Meade’s reply to Lee stated that ‘neither the United States Government, myself, nor General Kilpatrick authorized, sanctioned, or approved the burning of the city of Richmond and the killing of Mr. Davis and cabinet…,’ and enclosed a somewhat toned-down version of Kilpatrick’s denial that only hinted that the papers had been tampered with. In short, no one had ordered or authorized Colonel Dahlgren to commit any criminal acts. The awful tale began and ended with him.²¹

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There, officially, the matter rested. Yet as he prepared for the spring campaign, General Meade was not satisfied that the truth had prevailed and was unhappy, he told his wife, that he ‘necessarily threw odium on Dahlgren.’ He went on to tell her that he had sent General Lee the letter of Kilpatrick’s impugning the authenticity of the Dahlgren papers, and he added, ‘but I regret to say Kilpatrick’s reputation, and collateral evidence in my possession, rather go against this theory.’²²

While Meade did not further describe this ‘collateral evidence,’ it was almost certainly the testimony of the Bureau of Military Information’s second-in-command, Captain John McEntee, who accompanied Dahlgren on the raid. In his diary for March 12, army Provost Marshal Brig. Gen. Marsena Patrick, under whose department the BMI operated, recorded a conversation with Captain McEntee. ‘He has the same opinion of Killpatrick [sic] that I have and says he managed just as all cowards do,’ Patrick wrote. ‘He further says, that he thinks the papers are correct that were found upon Dahlgren, as they correspond with what D. told him….’

General Meade could have gotten this same opinion from McEntee or by report from John Babcock, the BMI liaison officer at Meade’s headquarters who helped to plan the raid. Babcock left confirming testimony of his own in the matter. About this time he wrote: ‘Letters found on Dahlgren’s body published in Richmond papers….[are an] Authentic report of contents.’ Whether the collateral evidence came from McEntee or Babcock, both of whom qualify as expert witnesses, General Meade was convinced others were involved in the scheme to kill Davis. Yet it was not evidence that he wanted made public. ‘I was determined my skirts should be clear,’ he told his wife.²³

The most vehement assertion that the Dahlgren papers were ‘a bare-faced, atrocious forgery’ concocted by ‘the miserable caitiffs’ in Richmond came, not surprisingly, from Dahlgren’s father, Admiral John Dahlgren. The grieving parent was deeply wounded by Richmond’s characterization of his child as ‘Ulric the Hun.’ During the summer of 1864 he was shown one of the lithographed broadsides of his son’s papers that John Slidell had been circulating in Europe. ‘I felt from the first…that my son never wrote that paper,’ the admiral said, pointing triumphantly to the signature on the address document: It was misspelled! And indeed on the broadsheet the name is clearly misspelled–U. Dalhgren rather than U. Dahlgren, with the ‘h’ and the ‘l’ transposed. The admiral also insisted that his son always signed his full first name, never just the initial. ‘I pronounce those papers a base forgery,’ cried the admiral.²⁴

It would take the combined efforts of former Confederate general Jubal Early and historian James O. Hall to solve this particular puzzle. In 1879, Early carefully examined a set of the photographs taken in Richmond of the original Dahlgren address to his men. There were three photographic prints: one each of the two pages on cavalry corps stationery, and a third showing the concluding six lines of the address and the signature. Early pointed out that the conclusion of the speech was written across the back of page one, and that the inked writing had seeped through the thin paper. In the signature this show-through of letters from page one was quite marked, and it was possible to read Dahlgren’s signature, Early thought, as a misspelling of his name.

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